Watching the Dark (Inspector Banks Mystery)

by Robinson, Peter

  Banks arrived during a break between sets, and saw Penny standing at the bar surrounded by admirers, a pint in her hand. She looked radiant, tall, slim, her long black hair streaked with grey. She spotted Banks through the sea of faces in the semi-darkness, and he could have sworn her expression perked up, just a little. She waved him over and manouevred a bit of room for him beside her. They were pushed together by the crush of people trying to order drinks. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation as far as Banks was concerned.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she greeted him, leaning forward to give him a quick peck on the cheek. The young man beside her, in the midst of a rather tedious lecture about the ‘folk revival’, seemed a bit put out by Banks’s appearance, but Penny seemed relieved at the interruption and focused her attention on the newcomer. Banks did likewise. When you were that close to her, looking into her eyes, it was difficult to do otherwise. They sparkled with an inner glow, full of mischief, sorrow and wisdom. The young man trailed off in mid-sentence and drifted away, crestfallen, back to his mates and more beer.

  ‘He’s too young for you, anyway,’ said Banks.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m not averse to the occasional toyboy,’ said Penny. ‘Though I do admit to being more partial to a real man. So what have you been up to?’

  Banks realised that he hadn’t seen her since the nasty business with Tracy the previous autumn, having either been working or shutting himself away in his cottage for the winter. He told her briefly about his travels in Arizona and Southern California. Penny, it seemed, had been doing quite a bit of travelling herself during the winter, mostly in Canada and the US on a promotional tour for her new CD. There was no mention of a man in her life, and Banks didn’t ask.

  ‘I see your son Brian’s doing well,’ Penny said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Banks. ‘He’s just got back from America himself. I think they had a good tour, then they did some recording in Los Angeles.’

  ‘I saw a few posters while I was over there. Impressive. I’m sure The Blue Lamps sell a lot more than I do.’

  They did, of course. Britpop with a tinge of psychedelia and a smattering of country-folk-blues did far better than traditional British folk music in the States. ‘I’m hoping he’ll be able to support me in my old age,’ Banks said.

  Penny laughed. ‘I suppose that’s one use for children. So what have you been doing since you got back? I heard someone was found dead up at Garskill Farm Is that true?’

  ‘News travels fast,’ said Banks. ‘It’s no secret. Someone told us there was a group of Gypsies or Travellers living up there, but I’m not so sure.’

  ‘How perceptive of you,’ said Penny. ‘What an insult. I’ve got friends in those communities, and they wouldn’t stay in a dump like Garskill. It’s migrant workers.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m a folk singer. I have my finger on the pulse of the folk.’

  Banks laughed. ‘Seriously.’

  ‘A friend told me. I still have my connections among the local historians and writers, you know.’

  ‘But where do they work?’

  ‘There are plenty of places where they’re not fussy who they employ, as long as the labour comes cheap enough, and most of these people aren’t in a position to complain. Varley’s Yeast Products, just north of town, for example. They’ve been using slave labour for years. Then there’s that slaughterhouse outside Darlington, a meat-packing factory out Carlisle way, the chemical-processing plant south of Middlesbrough. I’m surprised you don’t know about all this.’

  ‘It comes under Trading Standards or Immigration,’ said Banks. ‘At least it did. Now I’m not so sure. Anyway, you seem to know a lot about it. Do you know anything about the people who were living there?’

  ‘Not about any of them specifically, or individually, no. Are you grilling me now?’

  ‘It sounds like it, doesn’t it? Actually, I came out to get away from thinking about it. I was up there today, and it’s a bloody depressing place. Have you ever been there?’

  ‘Years ago,’ said Penny. ‘It was pretty much in a state of disrepair back then. I can only imagine what it’s like now.’

  ‘Those places were built to last,’ said Banks, ‘but I don’t envy the poor sods who were staying there.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been their choice,’ said Penny. ‘They’re lured over here by the promise of jobs. It costs them all their savings, then they’re paid less than minimum wage for shit work, and they’ve got no recourse. Most of them don’t even speak English. They start out in debt; they get deeper and deeper in debt. Can you believe there are even loan sharks who prey on them?’

  Banks could. Once more the name Warren Corrigan came to mind. He would be paying Mr Corrigan a visit on Monday.

  The musicians – acoustic guitar, accordion, stand-up bass and fiddle – assembled on stage again, picking up and tuning their instruments. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ said Penny, touching Banks’s arm lightly. ‘Will you be here later?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Banks. ‘It’s been a long day. I’m dog tired.’

  ‘Try to last out the set,’ she said. ‘Any requests?’

  ‘“Finisterre”,’ Banks said, without thinking.

  Penny blinked in surprise. ‘“Finisterre”? OK. It’s been a long time, but I think I can manage that.’

  And she did. Unaccompanied. Her low, husky voice seemed to have grown richer over the years, with the qualities of warm dark chocolate and a fine Amarone. It wasn’t quite as deep in range as June Tabor’s, but it wasn’t far off. She went through ‘Death and the Lady’, ‘She Moved Through the Fair’, ‘Flowers of Knaresborough Forest’ and a number of other traditional songs. She didn’t neglect contemporary works, either. Dylan was represented by the moving and mysterious ‘Red River Shore’, Roy Harper by ‘I’ll See You Again’, and Richard Thompson by a version of ‘For Shame of Doing Wrong’ that brought tears to Banks’s eyes, the way Penny’s voice cracked in its heartbreaking chorus. She finished with what could, in someone else’s hands, have been a mere novelty, a slow, folksy version of Pulp’s ‘Common People’. But it worked. Her version brought depth out of the anthem and gave its lyrics a weight that was often easy to miss. Everyone sang along with the chorus, and the applause at the end was deafening. What Jarvis Cocker would have made of it, Banks had no idea, but it didn’t matter; he’d never been able to take Jarvis Cocker seriously, anyway, though he did like ‘Common People’ and ‘Running the World’. Maybe it was just his name.

  As the crowd settled back to drink up their last orders when the band had finished, Penny came over to the corner table, where Banks had managed to find a chair, and sat down. A couple of the band members joined her, and the young man from the interval lurked in the background looking sulky and swaying a little, pint in hand. Banks had met the band members before and said hello. The accordion player was actually a DS from Durham Constabulary moonlighting as a folkie. ‘You made it,’ Penny said, smiling. ‘Didn’t doze off, did you?’

  ‘Not once. Thanks for singing my request.’

  ‘Pleasure. It’s a lovely song. I’d forgotten how lovely. Thanks for reminding me of it. So sad, though.’

  ‘Well, there aren’t an awful lot of happy folk songs, are there? It’s all murders, demon lovers, vengeful spirits, things that have vanished, how fleeting life and pleasure are, love turned cool, died or lost.’

  ‘Too true,’ said Penny. ‘Look, a few of us are going back to the house. Want to come along? No doom and gloom, I promise.’

  ‘I’d really love to,’ said Banks, ‘but I fear I wouldn’t last long.’ In fact, he wanted to end the evening as he ended most evenings, at home in his dark conservatory looking at the moon and stars outside, with a nightcap and some quiet music. He felt he could face it now. He didn’t feel like a party any more.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I understand. Murderers to catch, and all that.’

  Banks nodded. ‘Murderers to catch.’ If only it were that
easy. ‘Goodnight.’

  As Banks left, the eager young man with the theories about the folk revival took his seat, swaying and spilling a little beer as he moved. Penny said hello and smiled politely at him but immediately fell into conversation with her guitarist. Banks didn’t think she would be inviting the young man back to her house. She looked in Banks’s direction as he was leaving and smiled.

  Outside, he noticed a hint of peat smoke in the cool night air, reminding him that it was still only April, no matter how pleasant the days were becoming. No music followed him into the night as he walked the half mile home, mostly along the Pennine Way, with a bright moon and a scattering of stars to light his way. The exercise and fresh air would do him good after a day hanging around in the mire of Garskill Farm.

  As he walked along the path that clung to the hillside, which stepped down in a series of lynchets to Gratly Beck, he pictured the migrant worker’s body again. Somehow, no matter how many times it happened, he never got quite used to it. He thought of Penny again and knew he shouldn’t read anything into her friendly behaviour. It was just her way; she was a free spirit, a bit flirtatious, mischievous. Still, he couldn’t help but hope. It seemed that nothing had cured him of that. Not Sandra. Not Annie. Not Sophia.

  Chapter 5

  Banks got to the office early enough on Monday morning to listen to Today for a while as he went through his in tray. Before long, sick to death of hearing how bad the economy was and how violent things were in the Middle East, he switched over to catch the end of Breakfast on Radio 3, where a stately Haydn symphony was playing.

  As expected, nothing much had happened on Sunday. Banks had called in at the station briefly, and he found Haig and Lombard working away at the escort agency websites. Doug Wilson and Gerry Masterson were out conducting interviews. He guessed that Joanna Passero would be at home, as would most of the CSIs and lab technicians they so needed to start producing results. Winsome had arranged for the Garskill Farm victim’s photo to be on the evening news that night, and it would be shown again the following morning and evening. She had spent most of Sunday asking more questions in Ingleby. There hadn’t been many calls made from the telephone box there, and the ones of interest to Banks, made around the time Mrs Boscombe had seen the man resembling the victim, had all been to mobiles. One was to Bill Quinn, another was a pay-as-you-go, impossible to trace, and the third was an Estonian number they were trying to track down.

  Early on Monday morning, the upper floors of the police station were still mostly empty, and Banks enjoyed a little quiet time gazing down on the market square, the gold hands against the blue face of the church clock telling him it was a quarter past eight. He made some notes, answered a couple of emails and binned most of the official memos and circulars that had piled up. As Banks worked, he heard people arriving, footsteps on the stairs, office doors opening and closing along the corridor, good mornings, brief comments on the weekend’s football and television. A normal Monday morning.

  By nine o’clock he was ready for a gathering of the troops, but before he could round them up, there was a knock at his door and Stefan Nowak, Crime Scene Manager, walked in. The two had known one another for years. Stefan was unusual among CSIs for being a detective sergeant rather than a civilian. He was working towards his inspector’s boards, and he already had a BSc and a number of forensics courses under his belt. He wasn’t a specialist, but something of a jack of all trades, and his management skills made him perfect for the job. He still spoke with a slight Polish accent, though Banks understood that he had been in England for years. He never talked much about his past or his private life, so Banks was not certain what his story was. He sensed that Stefan liked to cultivate an aura of mystery. Perhaps he thought it made him more attractive to the opposite sex. He had a reputation for being a bit of a ladies’ man, and dressed as stylishly as Ken Blackstone, though in a more casual, youthful way. He was a lot better-looking, too, with a full head of healthy, well-tended hair.‘I hope you’ve got something for me, Stefan,’ Banks said. ‘We could do with a break right now.’

  Nowak sat down, pulling at his creases the way Ken Blackstone did. ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed,’ he said. ‘I paid a visit to Garskill Farm yesterday and had a chat with the Crime Scene Manager Mr Smedley. I must say, he’s a bit tense and prickly, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s one way of describing him.’

  ‘Anyway, I wanted to compare some fibres and tyre tracks as soon as possible, and it seemed the best way.’

  ‘And were you able to?’

  ‘Not until just now,’ said Nowak. ‘The team worked very hard and late up at that dreadful place. The report was in my tray when I got in a little over an hour ago. Someone must have dropped it off late last night.’ Nowak spent most of his time in Scientific Support, next door, which had been taken over as an annexe when Eastvale was the headquarters of the Western Area. It would probably remain as it was, because it was damn useful, and it saved money in the long run. Like most county forces, Eastvale sent most of the evidence collected at crime scenes out to an accredited forensic laboratory for analysis, but there were one or two things they could handle in their own labs here, such as fingerprint and basic fibre analysis, photographic services and documents. Not DNA or blood, though. In the end, most trace evidence went to the official Forensic Science Service Laboratory at Wetherby, or to one of the specialist labs dealing with such matters as entomology or forensic archaeology. But having some services in-house saved time as well as money.

  ‘Anything useful?’

  ‘Depends what you mean. The book that someone left behind there was in Polish, by the way. A translation of The Da Vinci Code.’

  ‘That’s a promising start. Fancy a coffee?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Banks rang down for a pot of coffee. He still needed about three cups to kick-start him in a morning, and so far he had had only one at home to wash down the slice of toast and marmalade that passed for breakfast.

  Nowak shuffled the files in front of him, picking out photographs of hairs and tyre tracks that didn’t mean much to Banks. ‘The long and the short of it is that we can place the same car at both scenes,’ Nowak announced. ‘The tracks at Garskill Farm were poor because of the rain, of course, but the ground was very hard to start with, and Smedley’s lads managed to get some impressions. There’s some very distinctive cross-hatching on one of the tyres.’ He showed Banks two photographs; even he could see that the little scratches on both were the same.

  ‘So hang on a minute,’ said Banks. ‘These are photographs from two different scenes, right? You’re saying that the tracks from the farm lane near St Peter’s match tracks found in the old driveway at Garskill Farm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Banks. It was the forensic link he had been hoping for. It wouldn’t offer an easy solution to the case, and perhaps it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it would help them focus, give them a sense of direction and a fruitful line of inquiry. ‘I don’t suppose you can tell the make, year and colour? Licence plate, too, perhaps?’

  Nowak laughed. ‘Not the year. Not yet. It’s not a rugged terrain vehicle, though, I can tell you that much. We’ve got the wheelbase measurement and identified the brand of the tyres, ContiSportContact 2. So now we have to see how many car manufacturers use them, but we should be able to come up with a bit more information soon. Going by the size and wheelbase dimensions, I’d say we’re looking at something along the lines of a Ford Focus. All this is still preliminary, of course. Guesswork. We’re working from photographs, and we won’t be able to state with any more certainty until we get the Dentstone KD impressions done.’

  Banks scribbled on his notepad. ‘But you think that what you’ve told me is accurate so far?’

  ‘Ninety per cent.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me right now.’

  ‘Oh, I forgot to mention. It’s dark green.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘
The car. It’s dark green.’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘Not at all. It brushed against a fencepost and got a little scratch. We’re having the paint analysed as well as the tyre tracks. We can probably get you the make, model and year from the paint reference databases, wheelbase and tyre type, when we’ve got it all itemised, but I’m afraid even that won’t be able to tell us the licence number. Still, taken in combination, it should all help us be a lot more accurate.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Banks.

  ‘You should be.’

  The coffee arrived. They both took it black, so Banks poured from the metal pot into a couple of mugs and passed one to Nowak. ‘There’s more,’ said Nowak, after he had taken his first sip. ‘I’ve just been having a look through the comparison microscope at fibres from both crime scenes. We found quite a few strands of synthetic fibre, most likely from a cheap, mass-produced overcoat of some kind, stuck to the tree from which we think the killer fired his crossbow. Smedley’s team found similar fibres at Garskill Farm, in the building where the body was found. Doorpost, chair.’

  ‘So the same person was in both places?’

  ‘So it would seem. Or the same overcoat. We still have a fair way to go to be certain – spectrographic analysis, dye comparisons and so on – but from what I can see at first glance, the fibres match. I wouldn’t read too much into that as a scientist without all the other things I’ve mentioned. After all, it’s pretty common. These overcoats are mass-produced, as I said, and anyone could buy one from Marks and Spencers or wherever. When we’ve got a better sense of the make-up of the fibre and the dyes used, we’ll start searching the databases and talking to manufacturers and retailers. But all that will take time, and it’s still very unlikely to give us a name. I thought you might want a few preliminary signposts as soon as possible. There are footprints, too. Rather too many to be especially valuable, but their expert thinks some of them match the ones you took from the woods at St Peter’s. Same size and distinctive cut on the sole. He was there, in both places.’